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After CEO Sam Altman was dramatically fired and rehired in November 2023, he got right back to work building up OpenAI, best known for ChatGPT.
Now, about a year after that leadership upheaval, and two years after the seismic launch of that chat bot, Altman sat down with Josh Tyrangiel for a wide-ranging interview. Josh joined David Gura to talk about Altman’s evolution from Silicon Valley venture capitalist to a leader of the AI revolution, and how Altman is approaching the future of OpenAI — and planning to navigate the next four years under the Trump administration.
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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:
David Gura: It’s the rarest of product launches, when a company debuts something most of the general public couldn’t have imagined, and then, all of a sudden, it seems like no one can talk about anything else:
Tape: Techies everywhere short circuiting with excitement…
Tape: This is the closest thing I've seen to like the Star Trek computer…
Tape: … Are we going to have this thing filling out like dating profiles now? Am I going to fall in love with ChatGPT?
Gura: Open AI released ChatGPT in 2022, and as enthusiasm for the chat bot surged, so did the company’s ambitions, along with interest from investors. Which made another round of headline-grabbing news from Open AI so surprising:
Tape: Sam Altman, who has drawn comparisons to tech giants like Steve Jobs, was dismissed by the OpenAI board Friday.
Tape: We're reporting there are efforts to get Sam Altman back.
Tape: Open AI reinstating Sam Altman as CEO and hitting go on a board shakeup.
Gura: Altman was fired and re-hired over the course of a long weekend. It has been, and continues to be, a wild ride for Open AI, a company that’s not even ten. A famous Altman quotation is “The days are long but the decades are short.” He recently amended that to, “The days are long, and the decades are also [BLEEP] very long…” At least that’s what he told journalist Josh Tyrangiel recently. Josh got an invite, from Open AI, to spend a few days with Altman – someone he’s interviewed before, for a piece that’s the cover story of the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.
Josh Tyrangiel: Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, and a year after the board firing, you know, they had some stuff that kind of wanted to straighten out for the record.
Gura: Josh went to San Francisco, and conducted what is the most wide-ranging interview Altman has done as Open AI’s chief executive. They talked about the past, and looked ahead to the future, acknowledging that there is only so much faith you can put in predictions about what’s next for a company like Open AI.
I’m David Gura, and this is “The Big Take,” from Bloomberg News. Today on the show: Josh Tyrangiel unpacks his interview with Open AI’s Sam Altman. New details about the launch of ChatGPT, and that weekend in 2023, when Altman lost his job, and fought to get it back.Plus, what Josh expects AI regulation will look like during Donald Trump’s second term, and what motivated Altman to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.
Gura: I'd love to start with some history and a bit of biography here. What was Sam Altman's life like before he founded this company?
Tyrangiel: Before, uh, OpenAI took off, Sam Altman was a Silicon Valley-famous, uh, guy. He was known as a venture capitalist. He was known as a sort of CEO and startup whisperer. He had very rigorous standards as far as the kinds of people he would invest in. But he ran Y Combinator, which is a really famous fund that took an active role in kind of curating leadership. He was also known on the kind of circuit of, you know, TED Talks and conferences. Like, he was that kind of famous. As soon as ChatGPT launched, uh, I would say within weeks, he was world famous. And that's what happens when you make something that a hundred million people use within, you know, six, eight weeks.
Gura: Can you walk us through what the launch of ChatGPT was like for him? How he experienced that moment?
Tyrangiel: People knew that there were chatbots, Chatbots were a thing. They were generally pretty clunky. Um, and so ChatGPT 3.5 shows up and people inside Open AI were really skeptical of why they were launching it. They thought it wasn't ready. Basically they thought it was going to fail. And Sam, as he details in the interview said that, you know, he doesn't make a whole lot of, “I say we're doing it, we're doing it” kinds of decisions, but in this instance, you know, he kind of put his finger in the wind. He read the zeitgeist. He thought the product was more than good enough. And so they launched it. And so for the first handful of days, it was doing okay, and there was a lot of skepticism still within the company. Well, look, this is, this is ridiculous. Why did we do it? It's not taking off. Because he'd been at Y Combinator, he was familiar with the sort of pattern of a launch. And so what he was seeing was in the first five, six days that there'd be a peak of usage during the day and it would go down at night. A peak of usage during the day and it would go down at night. But what made it different and where he says, I think, that people didn't quite realize inside the company what they had, was that the trough was always higher and the peak was always higher. And so after about a week, he was like, folks, we are failing to understand what we have on our hands.
Gura: Central to this story is how this company is structured. It's organized at the beginning as a nonprofit. Why was that the case?
Tyrangiel: You know, the structure of the company is almost as complicated as explaining artificial general intelligence. It's weird. And I think it started from this very sincere place, which was, we're going to make artificial intelligence that will benefit the world. And so what we shouldn't do is have this incredible profit motive looming over us at all times. Let's not make short term quarterly decisions. Let's make decisions in decade-long increments. And that was the thing that all of the founders agreed to, and among those founders or co-founders was Elon Musk, right? What they found out along the way is not only that that was a sort of doomed structure for, for a lot of just human reasons, but that the power of compute, which is the noun that we sort of use to talk about what it costs to generate an artificial intelligence model, just the cost of GPUs. The cost of energy is so huge that a nonprofit couldn't compete. And so at some point they were confronted with a decision, which is, remain this sort of pure nonprofit in which you're kind of a sleepy research arm, but all the real computing work is happening within the big three or four companies in the world — or, start to compete. And I think the founding origins of that were sincere, and that they really believed initially, well, we're just going to do this for humanity and then had to confront reality.
Gura: You mentioned the sleepiness of research. It clearly is the thing that animates him. He has this obsessiveness with research, obsessiveness with artificial general intelligence. What is AGI?
Tyrangiel: David, are you kidding me? You, you call me…
Gura: And you go back and forth, you go back and forth with him on this as well.
Tyrangiel: Well, no, I'll tell you, I mean, one, yeah. One of the most interesting things — and confounding things, if you're just a normal person tuning into this debate, is that even the people pursuing artificial general intelligence cannot tell you what artificial general intelligence is.
Gura: Huh.
Tyrangiel: And so even in the interview, at some point, you know, Sam says, if we were to create a model that could do the work of multiple humans, that you could assign it a task and it can complete it, that would be AGI-ish. So the guy, the most famous guy pursuing AGI uses “ish.” Now that is confounding. That said, a lot of great scientific discoveries, and a lot of, you know, the things that propel us forward in civilization, are a little bit “ish”. But it's very hard for me to tell you what AGI is if Sam Altman can't do it.
Gura: Let me ask you one more question along these lines, which is, you mentioned you've spoken with him a number of times. How, how has your sense of him, your understanding of him evolved through those interviews?
Tyrangiel: I think that, the one thing that continues to resonate is he is 100 percent hellbent on getting to AGI before anybody else. And he is running the company with that singular goal in mind. And so when they're doing all these raises, when they're staying focused on the, on the latest model and trying to stay out in front of everybody, I think it's because he's animated by this sense of purpose around the science and the belief as a business person that getting there first is the only thing that matters.
Gura: There's this crucial moment in the OpenAI story that plays out over a weekend. Sam Altman is fired. Then a few days later, he's, he's rehired. We're now more than a year away from, from that. And I wonder if anyone, if he has a clear understanding of, of why things transpired the way they did.
Tyrangiel: I think he has the clearest understanding of anyone who is not on that board. I tried to get at it in a number of ways, right? I even offered my own theory, which is that, uh, basically the board was a bunch of purists and they were, uh, formed. At a moment when a nonprofit pursuit of artificial intelligence seemed like the right thing and that they were struggling to adapt to the reality that basically being a nonprofit in this space was going to doom the company to failure. And that Sam was determined not to let it fail. I think that is actually the crux of the tension. My hunch, honestly, is that this was something that was doomed to happen from the moment they decided to be founded as a nonprofit. Without getting all the parties together in front of microphones, I think we have enough information to know that this was a conflict around the purpose of the work. And the original board really felt like it was consistent with the mission of OpenAI to kill the company, if it couldn't make AI with a sort of rigorous, safe, nonprofit standard, and he was not going to let the company die.
Gura: You asked Sam what the fallout has been from that moment, from that hectic weekend. If he felt like afterward he needed to convince his colleagues that he's good, I think is how you put it. How did his firing, his rehiring affect his ability to sort of work with people in OpenAI and more broadly in the kind of nascent AI industry?
Tyrangiel: Yeah. Look, I'm super fascinated by the human elements behind all this stuff. You know, he said that the first couple of days and probably the first couple of weeks were super weird. People looked at him funny. People didn't know exactly what this was all about. I think within the industry itself, you know, it was the classic, uh, everybody at a competing company, you know, had a bowl of popcorn. It was like, let's see how this goes, right? Um, but I also think that there was an understanding in the industry writ large and the companies that they partner with in the companies that they compete with that Sam is a force and that they didn't question his credibility or his credentials to run the company. They were probably hoping he would get fired and be forced to start all over again somewhere else so they could catch up. And then as far as it, you know, to return to what happens inside the company, I think it's one of those things where if you're there day in and day out. And there is the kind of attrition and turnover that you would normally expect in a startup, you know, within a couple of months, it was a blip. So I think that's how he reckoned with it.
Gura: After the break, we turn from OpenAI’s past to its future.
Gura: When Sam Altman returned as the CEO of OpenAI, he retook the helm of a rapidly evolving and closely watched company. He told journalist Josh Tyrangiel that, after Altman was re-instated, his attitude was, as he put it: “We got a complicated job to do. I’m gonna keep doing this.” He basically resolved to put his head down and get back to work. I asked Josh how that played out, and what Altman’s life is like, day-to-day:
Gura: There's a moment where he shows you his calendar, and I wonder if you could just describe sort of what that's like.
Tyrangiel: Yeah. So Sam, uh, when I asked about how he runs the company, just sort of day to day, where he's spending his time, you know, he just flipped his laptop around. And, uh, pulled up his Google Calendar and it's a mess. I mean, it's just an absolute mess of colors, conflicts, starting from about 7 a.m. going until about 9:15 with some dinners after even that. And lots of, like, overlapping meetings, lots of small meetings, lots of one on ones with engineers. I'm sure many of your listeners have calendars that look similar. What I would say is that it was just day after day after day, pre-scheduled, there's not a lot of walking around time. It's indicative of a company that is in a full competitive sprint to get someplace. So, yeah, it was pretty daunting.
Gura: Let me ask you a bit about the future of the company and his plans for it. OpenAI has already changed the history, the trajectory of the AI industry. What did Sam tell you about his plans for the future of the company, sort of where he sees things going?
Tyrangiel: He used the word protect; that the company is structured to protect research. And so I think those are the words I would look to as I monitor the company over the next few years, he is hell bent on protecting the research and getting to AGI. I think he believes everything else will take care of itself. If they can do that. And in that way, you know, even though the tech is wildly new and unconventional, the business approach is fairly conventional, right? It's not that different to a late nineties, you know, web startup, which is, we got to get audience, right? We got to get as big as possible, as quickly as possible. And then the finances will sort themselves out. It's Amazon’s strategy. It's Facebook’s strategy. So that's how I would project what the next few years hold. Protect the research, productize effectively, see where we are in 18 months to two years.
Gura: Josh, what are the biggest challenges that he and OpenAI face, um, sort of seeking that, that objective? Is it bandwidth? Is it getting compute?
Tyrangiel: The three challenges that the industry as a whole faces are just getting the compute, right. Getting access to the GPUs that you need, the energy to power those GPUs, and then the biggest question and most unknowable is are the models plateauing? Are you continuing to see artificial intelligence gain steam, in training the models, right? He's extremely confident that their models are not plateauing. There's some debate within the industry, whether that's bluster or not. On energy, you know, I, I like to be a fairly prepared, smooth interviewer. I will admit, I was rendered a momentarily mute when I asked him about energy, and he's like, fusion's gonna work. Like uh, I'm sorry, what now? Which fusion? When? Huh? But, you know, he is a cofounder of a company called Helion with Reid Hoffman and some others, and believes in, fusion is coming, and fusion will be a sort of silver bullet for our energy issues. And then on chips, you know, look, they, like everybody else, uh, they are finding and buying as many chips as they possibly can. They have their own fab effort going to make sure that they're never beholden to one supplier. So those are the three things. He feels very confident that they're positioned to address all three. And then the fourth, which is unique to OpenAI, which I asked him about, is like, right, let's talk about governance, because we now are in a place where, uh, the man who really is calling himself a kind of co-president has a competing AI company, was once Sam Altman's co-founder, and is currently suing the company. That is a level of volatility, you know, I can't predict, he can't predict. But Elon Musk's existence is a factor in how companies will do in developing AI.
Gura: You mentioned governance. Let me ask you about his relationship with Washington and, and policymakers and politicians there. He donated a million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration fund. He told you he supports any president. How, how authentic did that sound to you when, when he said that, that, that he, you know, would support a Democrat or Republican, whoever's in the, in the White House?
Tyrangiel: You know, it's hard for me to speculate about his authenticity. What I can say is that taking a step back strategically, whether I'm Sam Altman or anyone else who is competing with Elon Musk, I think the smartest approach is to lavish praise on the President and to try and create any sort of friction I possibly could between Elon Musk and the President. And so by saying, oh, I support, of course I support the American President. I may not agree with everything, but he's the President. I wish for his great success. And then saying, Oh, you know, Elon, uh, you know, he's going to do what he's going to do. He's, he's the co-president. I think anything that creates that friction is probably beneficial to people competing with Elon. It will not surprise me if that's a tactic taken by others as well. Um, but as I said, I can't speak to the authenticity of it. I just think there's, it's not the worst strategy.
Gura: How does he see the role of Washington in regulating this, this new technology? Does he see a role for, for Washington here? And what does that role look like under this, this new administration?
Tyrangiel: Yeah. Famously look Sam is a, he thought this should be a nationalized technology, similar to nuclear power. Thought it was that powerful, that dangerous, um, and that important to the national interest. And he got no buyers, no bites, no interest. And he needed the money. I mean, OpenAI needed the money, the investment. Under the Biden administration, he was very close with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. He was very close to the commission that worked on the executive order around AI. He wants regulation. I think some of that is ideological. I think some of it's competitive when you're out in front. Hey, let's tap the brakes on everybody else, right? But in the last four years, he has been an active participant and collaborator with the federal government in figuring out what to do with artificial intelligence. But he's no dummy. I think he's going to take the temperature of the Trump administration, see where it is. React accordingly. Um, But yeah, historically, he's been very much in favor of regulation of these models.
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